PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification Data for Learning Enhanced Generation
Sedrick Scott Keh, Kevin Lu, Varun Gangal, Steven Y. Feng, Harsh Jhamtani, Malihe Alikhani, Eduard Hovy
Abstract
A personification is a figure of speech that endows inanimate entities with properties and actions typically seen as requiring animacy. In this paper, we explore the task of personification generation. To this end, we propose PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification data for Learning Enhanced generation. We curate a corpus of personifications called PersonifCorp, together with automatically generated de-personified literalizations of these personifications. We demonstrate the usefulness of this parallel corpus by training a seq2seq model to personify a given literal input. Both automatic and human evaluations show that fine-tuning with PersonifCorp leads to significant gains in personification-related qualities such as animacy and interestingness. A detailed qualitative analysis also highlights key strengths and imperfections of PINEAPPLE over baselines, demonstrating a strong ability to generate diverse and creative personifications that enhance the overall appeal of a sentence.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{keh-etal-2022-pineapple,
title = "{PINEAPPLE}: Personifying {IN}animate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification Data for Learning Enhanced Generation",
author = "Keh, Sedrick Scott and
Lu, Kevin and
Gangal, Varun and
Feng, Steven Y. and
Jhamtani, Harsh and
Alikhani, Malihe and
Hovy, Eduard",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Huang, Chu-Ren and
Kim, Hansaem and
Pustejovsky, James and
Wanner, Leo and
Choi, Key-Sun and
Ryu, Pum-Mo and
Chen, Hsin-Hsi and
Donatelli, Lucia and
Ji, Heng and
Kurohashi, Sadao and
Paggio, Patrizia and
Xue, Nianwen and
Kim, Seokhwan and
Hahm, Younggyun and
He, Zhong and
Lee, Tony Kyungil and
Santus, Enrico and
Bond, Francis and
Na, Seung-Hoon",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = oct,
year = "2022",
address = "Gyeongju, Republic of Korea",
publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.547/",
pages = "6270--6284"
}